


Promethean Heat

by Anna__S



Category: The 100 (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 13:06:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3327863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna__S/pseuds/Anna__S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were planets on different orbits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Promethean Heat

**Author's Note:**

> Diverges from canon at the end of Coup de Grace.

 

 

He slept through the war.   

And when he woke up, sometimes he wished he hadn’t. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

The inside of the tent was dark and musty and for one long moment, he thought he was still trapped in the cage.  Until he blinked and she was there, leaning over him, concern etched into her forehead.

“Clarke,” he said, his voice gravelly and low, like a rusted engine. He tried to reach for her hand, but his arm didn’t respond. His body felt boneless.

“Bellamy,” she said, a toothy grin transforming her face. She had a new, white scar cutting her eyebrow in half.  “Don’t - don’t try to move. You’re under pretty heavy sedation. I’m surprised you can even talk.”

He tried to remember the last time he was conscious, but all he could picture was pain.

“What, what happened?” he whispered.  She had to lean in close to make out the words.

“We won,” she told him, her smile widening even further.  “We won, Bellamy.  We couldn’t have done it without you." 

He tried to move his face into a grin to match hers, but the movement felt alien.  “Good,” he grunted through cracked lips. 

“They used you like a pincushion,” she said, her fingers trailing along the checkerboard of cuts and bruises stretching down his arm.  Her eyes widened as if she’d just realized what she was doing and she stopped.  With a Herculean effort, he squeezed her fingertips.  Her skin was warm and clean and _Clarke_ , and for the first time he took in what it meant that they were both still there, mostly whole. 

“I’m going to get Octavia,” she said. 

He shook his head and coughed.  “Stay,” he said. He would’ve been embarrassed, but he knew there was a good chance he wouldn’t remember this tomorrow. He could already feel the drugs fraying the edge of his vision. 

When he woke up from a long, dreamless sleep, Octavia was there, and then Monty and Raven. And something about their faces let him know that he needed to ask the question again. 

And that was the last time he saw Clarke before he realized the price they paid for their victory. Before he saw the rows of unmarked graves, some of them so small it was hard to believe they could fit anything inside.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn’t the only price he paid. Abby still wasn’t telling him everything they did to him, everything they took from him.  But his body had aged, weakened.  When he tried to pick up a gun, it slipped from his fingers like water.

His rehab was slow and his patience was short. He kept waiting to feel fully like himself; he’d never realized before how tied that was to his strength, to his ability to _do._ Taking care of himself was a responsibility he didn’t want. 

And the cages came back to him in flashes, as if the pieces of him that were left there were still trying to find their way back _. His eyes close, trying to disappear into the darkness of his skull, but the pain was there too, throbbing like a heartbeat. He’s not Cerberus or Hercules. He’s Prometheus, doomed to be consumed day after day, and never die._

His hands still shook when he walked, but he volunteered for a grave-digging shift with Raven anyway. She had silently offered him a walking stick, giving her own brace a rueful grin.  And she didn’t say a word when he worked at a slower pace than everybody else, each thrust with the shovel sending a scream of pain down his spine. 

He thought of Clarke’s words: _we couldn’t have done it without you_ and he shoved the shovel deeper into the hard, frozen crust of the earth. The callouses on his palms opened, bloody and raw.

Once he almost blacked out, but he jabbed his fingernails into his arms and managed to claw onto consciousness that way.  Dusk came and he kept digging, shaking off Raven’s offers. He dug until his legs gave way and he collapsed.

And that’s how she found him, kneeling in front of a half-hollowed grave.

“Bellamy,” she started but he shook his head. His body felt too small, as if there was a cry building inside of him, filling him.  “You went radio silent. There was no other way.” 

“You could’ve found one,” he said, meeting her eyes for the first time. “That’s what you do. There were kids in there, Clarke. And what about Maya? She risked her life to save me. I never would’ve made it out if she hadn’t helped us.”

“Don’t put this on me,” she said, “they couldn’t survive out here. You know I’m right. It was us or them. What was I supposed to do? Let them use us like a blood bank?”

“You sound like them,” he spit out. 

“The things we do don’t define us,” she said. “You taught me that.”

“And you taught me that what we do _matters_. That we need rules, or we don’t deserve to be here.”

“Things change,” she said resolutely. 

With one final reserve of strength, he pushed himself upright, cold sweat prickling on his neck. She reached an arm out for him but he pushed it aside. The last time she told him things change, people change, it felt like a chance at redemption. Now, it felt like a door slammed in his face.

He wasn’t sure who changed. If it was him, or her, or both of them, traveling in different directions, planets on opposite orbits. 

“Bellamy, please,” she said. “I’m keeping this alliance together with my bare hands, I need you on my side.”  The sudden switch from anger to sweetness threw him off, as it was probably intended to do. Her eyes widened and she suddenly looked exactly as young as she was.

“You know I’m with you,” he said, but the words felt wrong in his mouth and he wasn’t so sure. He let her help him up anyway and he walked back to the camp using her shoulder as a cane.

 

 

* * *

 

  

At the victory celebration, Bellamy sipped at something bitter tasting and watched his sister try to teach Lincoln how to dance like her. His uncomfortable steps looked like a parody of Octavia’s graceful motions and each song ended with her dissolving into laughter.  Occasionally, other Grounders joined in and Bellamy had to question when his wayward sister had become their best envoy. 

“Sometimes it feels like they’re the only things that made this worth it,” said Raven, making space on the bench next to him. She was wearing a style he didn’t recognize, something that cut across her torso, exposing a long dip of cleavage.

For a second, he wondered what would happen if he touched her skin, gripped her by the waist where he could feel the warmth of her skin bleeding through. They’d fucked once before, why not again. Instead he settled his arm around her. There were so few of them left that had been there from the beginning. And he needed them all.

“He’s a good guy,” said Bellamy.

“When he’s not slaughtering our people and eating their flesh,” she said in a light tone indicating that she considered this to be the least of their collective sins.

She was still watching Octavia dance, her eyes glistening, soft and sad. A long curl of hair fell into her face.

“I’m sorry about Finn,” he said, trying to infuse all the honesty he wasn’t sure he felt in his voice. “I know what he was to you.” 

“Thanks,” she said shortly. “He was like family…only family, they never came through for me. Not once.  And Finn always did. He was a category of his own. My Finn. And then he wasn’t. I guess you can’t really trust anybody to pull through for you, huh.” Her eyes flickered to the main table, where Clarke and Lexa had their heads tilted towards each other.   

“I trust you,” he said and she laughed and leaned her forehead against his shoulder. She smelled like engine grease and alcohol, like home.

“That’s because you’re smarter than you look,” she said and he smirked at her.

Across the opening, Clarke gestured at Raven. “The Commander calls,” she said, squeezing his hands and getting up. 

Clarke was drinking more heavily than Bellamy had seen before. He wondered if she would end up joining the growing, gyrating crowd. There was a time when he would’ve paid real money to see that. 

He took another chug of his drink.  He could already feel it in his limbs, warm and heady, mixing with the painkillers that got him out of bed in the morning. Yet another way this new body was betraying him.

 He glanced back to the table to wave goodbye to Clarke, but she was gone. No doubt plotting their next war or their next alliance.  Their next mass murder. With a grunt, he pulled himself up and hobbled toward his tent.

But when he got there, she was already there.  Her cheeks were bright and her hair was pulled away from her face in tight, intricate braids.

“Hey,” he said in surprise. 

Without a word, she pulled his head down to her and after a moment of shock, his lips opened into hers, his tongue tracing her slippery teeth, tasting the moonshine on her.  He pulled her closer, his hands spanning her ass, ignoring the pistol that was jammed painfully against his hip.  Her braids smacked against his chin when she wrapped her legs around him. 

When she pulled away, his breath was coming hard and fast, ragged, like he had run a marathon.  

“Are you up for this?” she asked him, her doctor face back on. His only response was to pull her to the ground, while he tugged at her shirt. She pulled it over her head and he burrowed his face into her stomach, tracking a line of faded bruises past her hipbone, the tip of his tongue following the lines of her ribs.  

She hesitated for a second when he pulled at her holster, then nodded and let him unclasp it.  The gun fell to the side with a loud thump.

He pressed his hands against her flattened breasts, her nipples hard  even through the thin fabric of her Arc-issued bra, once white, now yellow with dirt and age.  Her hands had found his dick and she was stroking him, a little too fast.

She paused to spit into her hands and then she sped up again, pulling groans from him, part pleasure, part pain. His stomach contracted and he could taste his breakfast. 

He couldn’t shake the feeling that she was more solid than he was. That he was barely tethered to his body. There was anger in the way that her body was pressed to him, in the way that she touched him.

He stilled her with his hips and kissed her again, sucking her lower lip into his.

She kissed him back, hard, but he could feel how methodical it was, how careful. She nipped at his ear with sharp teeth.   

He didn’t know if she was testing herself or if this was the only form of forgiveness she knew how to offer him. He remembered the way she couldn’t look at her mother at the feast, as if she was an enemy or a liability. And he thought of his mother, using her body for currency. 

This time he was the one to pull away, even though his cock twitched when her hand stilled around it. Her mouth was swollen and red and it made him want to kiss her again. 

“Clarke,” he said, placing his arms on her shoulders. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? I know a little something about pretending to be tougher than I am, remember?” 

“I want you to fuck me,” she said, yanking at the drawstring of his pants. The word _fuck_ felt like a weapon lobbed at him. “I don’t need to prove anything.” 

For a second, he considered it. His balls ached, his legs ached, every part of him ached for release, for the friction of skin on skin. For sleep. He wanted to bury himself inside her, to lose himself in her. 

“I don’t want to be that person again,” he said. 

Her cheeks flushed and she swallowed, a crease forming between her eyebrows. He knew her anger, but he thought he was done having it directed at him. 

“Sorry to bother you,” she said, acid in her tone. This was the voice voice that had brought down an entire civilization. “I’ll let you sleep.  Don’t forget your medication.” 

When he swallowed his pills, the constant pain that nagged him, like an itch under his skin faded, but not the heat coursing through his body. He took himself into his hands, slick and slow, and he did his best not to think of anything at all.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He learned to build graves faster, the shovel doing double-duty as a crutch and a tool. Some days, Octavia worked side by side by him and other days, she continued her training. He didn’t comment on the contrariness of it. Sometimes Raven came too, and other times, Clarke, worked at his side, silently.  When he slipped, she was always the first one to notice, the first one to pull him back up.

He could tell that the Grounders disapproved of her working like she was one of them, but if she noticed she didn’t care.  He did his best to ignore the whispers directed at her, the way they all looked at her with awe.  The way her war paint matched Lexa’s. 

Eventually, he could pick up a gun again, but each time he pulled the trigger, the kick of adrenaline sent his heart racing, picking up speed uncontrollably, like a boulder rolling downhill.

When they ran out of bodies, he kept the shovel and Lincoln showed him how to shape a rock into a hammer. Raven taught him about curvature and tension and Wick spent an afternoon building him a saw.

They had brought so much from the Ark, but it was starting to look like they brought all the wrong things.

Clarke asked him once, what he would do when the war was over. At the time, he wondered what made her think the wars would ever be over. 

Now, he thought maybe it was time to start learning how. He could start by building something small, something permanent. He had time. 

 

 


End file.
